Lance Armstrong Takes Aim at ’60 Minutes’

We’ll give it to Lance Armstrong: he’s not backing down in the face of growing accusations that he took performance enhancing drugs.

His former teammate Tyler Hamilton recently appeared on “60 Minutes” and suggested Armstrong had taken EPO, a banned drug that boosts red blood cells, during the 2001 Tour de Suisse.

Armstrong, who has denied participating in doping, has retained a high-powered legal team that includes white-collar lawyer to the stars John Keker.

That legal team is busily trying to earn its keep. It fired off a letter this week to the CBS News brass demanding an apology for alleged inaccuracies in the “60 Minutes” piece, the Austin American-Statesman reports.

Keker and his partner Elliot R. Peters accused “60 Minutes” of recklessly presenting information and bolstering their story with “untrue assertions and facts taken out of context.”

CBS News chairman Jeff Fager said “60 Minutes” stood by the story as “truthful, accurate and fair,” according to the Statesman.

Fager added: “Lance Armstrong and his lawyers were given numerous opportunities to respond to every detail of our reporting for weeks prior to the broadcast and their written responses were fairly and accurately included in the story. Mr. Armstrong still has not addressed charges by teammates Tyler Hamilton and George Hincapie that he used performance enhancing drugs with them.”

In the May 22 broadcast, Hamilton said Armstrong had told him he’d tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs at the Tour of Switzerland and that “people took care of it” and “figured out a way for it to go away.”

According to the letter, Armstrong did not test positive at the 2001 tour, the Statesman reports, noting that Armstrong is unsure whether he will sue the network. Armstrong hopes the network “will rectify the mistake,” a spokesman for the cyclist said.

“We alerted ’60 Minutes’ producers in advance of the show that virtually every single one of these allegations was false. We provided evidence to prove it, and we warned CBS that the defamatory message that it sought to convey was an outrage,” Keker and Peters wrote. “A categorical on-air apology is required.”

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